“The worse the political atmosphere, the better the atmosphere at the parade,” Michal Niepielski, a radio technician, told The Washington Post.

“People are fed up with feeling like they are under a boot and being trampled down. And they are reacting, they are organizing, they are resisting,” said Hubert Sobecki of the LGBTQ organization Love Does Not Exclude.

“The colors the rainbow on flags used in the past symbolized a new era, hope, social change, world peace and even, in Poland in the past, cooperation,” Wojcik said.

But the far-right only saw it as an LGBTQ symbol and organized around attacking it. “There was a label stuck to [the rainbow] paradoxically by nationalists, right-wing groups and homophobes who only saw it as an LGBT thing,” said Miroslawa Makuchowska of Campaign Against Homophobia.